Disaster! The written record of my FA Cup deeds has been lost. Maybe I could unearth it somewhere in the FIFA interface if I had an HDTV. Short synopsis: After beating Man Utd, Everton lost 3-1 to Wolves even WITH a 4-2-2-2 formation. Kevin Jarvis didn’t get all three goals this time. Ipswich and Cardiff kept dominating with Bellamy and Scotland being easily released by through balls to go one-on-one with the keeper and then pass back to someone else who scores. Eventually Arsenal beat all my teams and triumphed behind Marouane Chamakh, the second best striker in the world behind Eto’o in FIFA 11’s estimation.

St Mirren are plugging along, a solid third in the SPL. Every time I think we need to step up the difficulty, one of the Old Firm takes us down a peg. We do have two of the six double-digit scorers in the SPL (Higdon, Dargo, Kenny Miller, Anthony Stokes, David Goodwillie, and Andrius Velička who in reality scored a whopping 1 goal in his Aberdeen career). Game-by-game SPL results to follow after these isolated observations.

—

How can Hamilton be so terrible, both in reality and in ludic simulacra, when they have the SPL’s fastest player, Marco Paixão?

It’s very impressive that they got a clip of Martin Tyler saying at least one player’s name for … every team in the game? Every first-division team and every English team? Either way, it’s more than I expected and it’s especially impressive that, of all the players on K.A.A. Gent, the one name you hear Tyler pronounce is “Ljubijankič”. That’s going above and beyond.

Zlatan Ljubijankič, World Cup hero and scourge of U.S. fortunes, teams up with John Terry for the halftime three-legged race in Port Elizabeth.

But it’s odd that for some players the name is only said in a certain situation, which the game tries to identify but sometimes gets wrong. Is Jamie Carragher ALWAYS in with power and purpose? “That’s Lúcio’s tackle” may be the most obvious example. “Feed the Yak and he will score” was a nice surprise since in Everton’s default formation the Yak is absolutely never in a position to score. (No special soundbite for Saha?) When either Finland or Swansea play, Tyler practically harmonizes with himself, he’s saying “Now, Kuqi” so much.

Everyone notices the inaccurate comments, like “Great save by the goalkeeper! / Top, top stuff” for the most basic save, but most view it in good humor — particularly people who remember how awful the commentary was five years ago. I only get irritated when the game sends out contradictory assessments. The game’s Mind knows all and sees all within the game, am I right? It knows where every user- and algorithm-generated pixel is, and communicates the result of my actions visually on the screen in real time, auditorily through its twin larynxes Tyler and Gray in real time, and at a slight delay through the actions of the referee. I can understand when they compliment me on a clean tackle that then becomes a red card — that happens in real life. But what’s happening when I steal the ball, the opponent steals it back a second later, and two seconds later I’m complimented on stealing the ball? What kind of irreversible neural network was set into action? How can it possibly be irreversible? And why, when every single offside call is followed by an NFL-style replay using parallel lines to display exactly how far offside the fellow was, do they so often say it was just a hair offside when it was actually five feet, or vice versa? Some reminders of the fallibility of humanity, or the curse of the commentator as robo-Martin Tyler likes to call it, are welcome, but some are clearly forced.

There’s more than one team with Polonia Bytom’s sickly red-and-lavender color scheme. SM Caen do it in real life although they don’t look as purply in the game. And then there’s Catania, but they pair the red with more of a Marseillaise brilliant blue.

Can it be possible that there are more Irish kids joyful over the new addition of League of Ireland teams to the game than there are Irish kids embarrassed about how horribly every Irish team is rated?

ADO Den Haag always put up a good fight, but I always beat them. More satisfying guaranteed victories than those over utter tomato cans like Drogheda United, Bray Wanderers, Bohemians, St Patrick’s Athletic, Bohemians, or Strømsgodset.

Wikipedia reports of Pascal Bosschaart that “Strangely, he has never scored a goal in his long and relatively successful career.” Well, he scored a goal playing against me in FIFA 11. An own goal.

That game (Fluminense – ADO Den Haag) would have looked brilliant in HD.

More bad luck with Moroccans, following Zaaboub’s FA Cup snafu. Abdelghani Faouzi of Vitória de Guimarães got knocked out with a broken leg in the first 2 minutes against SM Caen. That was one of three yellow cards Caen accrued within a quarter hour of kickoff. In real life they’ve avoided going one-and-done from Ligue 1 so they must be doing something right.

Faouzi does look like he might have a delicate bone structure. Definitely a delicate hair structure.

I swear it used to be that the green button did the through ball to where a teammate is going to be, and the yellow button did the pass directly to him. Now it’s the opposite.

It’s nice how the blue button clearance seems like it’s going in a random direction but it ends up going to a teammate. Whereas the red button clearance actually does go in a random direction, to make up for getting it off quicker.

Is it wrong that my main substitution method, presuming no injuries, is to wait until the 65th minute and put in three guys at once? I like to think of it as the ice-hockey style of subbing. “And here’s the second shift.”

Spoiler alert!

About this post, and also about the movie discussed herein. At the end of Diamond Men there’s a twist, which leaves you satisfied if all you want is for the characters to do well because you like them so much. To me the effect was like if you got to the end of Mean Streets and it turned out that Harvey Keitel was now going to consolidate his empire after orchestrating the downfall of the guy he was pretending to be a saint towards. Total bait and switch in terms of the degree of drama I thought the characters were undergoing.

And it made me think: in certain genres, is the concept of the twist ending just unacceptable? Such as — and this is a pretty big group of stories — the serious drama that convinces us it’s striving for realism. We’re invested in these characters, we hope they do well, but that’s because we know them. The film says “Guess what, this guy had hidden powers!” So, he’s not the character I spent all this time following. I’ve been misled about the guy’s principles — I thought he was being himself in his reaction to a certain situation, but he was pretending. Who is he? I don’t know anymore, but I guess he had a happy ending.

Eddie was unimpressed by Bobby's musical taste.

One of the good movies Robert Forster made shortly after Jackie Brown was an wry, bittersweet drama called Diamond Men [2000], set and shot in small-town Pennsylvania and directed/produced/written by one Daniel M. Cohen [read an interview with him here]. It’s a struggling male workplace movie, it reminded me of American Buffalo and the less effervescent parts of Big Night. Teamed up to sell diamonds, to jewelry stores in places like Altoona and Johnstown, are Forster and Donnie Wahlberg. Their conversations make up most of the movie, whether driving, eating at hotel bars, or relaxing at Altoona’s most mystique-laden brothel. Obviously their rapport will determine the watchability, and the rapport goes very well.

Wahlberg plays the Donnie Wahlberg role of a cocky, streetwise guy [Bobby] who finds himself in a really good job where he fails to impress the veterans with his bravado. Forster’s character Eddie is Max Cherry in a somber suit instead of a polo shirt. He knows all the angles, he’s seen it all, nobody’s going to spring a surprise on him … within his frame of reference, which is limited to his job and the sort of people he encounters in it. Bobby makes mistakes, Eddie instructs him on not being a knucklehead, we see more moments of tension as Bobby insists on being a knucklehead at least 10% of the time, and all the while Eddie’s about to be fired for post-infarction uninsurability. Bobby introduces Eddie to the source of much of his unreliability, the women at the Altoona Riding Club. The madam [Jasmine Guy] wants everything to run smoothly; Eddie’s ex-prostitute love interest Katie [Bess Armstrong, the mom on My So-Called Life] brings peace and harmony to one corner of his world, but Bobby’s favorite girl Cherry [Kristin Minter] is a loose cannon.

Temptations to break protocol arise whenever they near Blair County, and this is the fatal flaw [shared by Bobby and Eddie in roughly 80% : 20% proportions] that leads to disaster, that leads to the excuse for firing Eddie that the corporate overlords were looking for.

I’ll tell you the disaster, since Diamond Men is just as worth watching [that is, very worth watching] if you know the plot. Cherry hangs out with criminals in her rural town, they find out she has clients who park outside the brothel with suitcases full of diamonds, and neither Bobby nor Eddie get killed, but they do get violently dispossessed of their product. Her lowlife friends are responsible for the one turning point in Eddie’s professional life, and the fact that they don’t seem to exist before or afterwards is not a good sign for the film’s efforts at realism.

I couldn't find any other good images from this film online. Owning it on VHS doesn't help.

Now, up to this point the movie’s been about Eddie, but we’ve hardly seen him alone. We see him through Bobby’s eyes, we see him through Katie’s eyes. He’s taciturn, he’s really the only character we see thinking, but he doesn’t do a voiceover. He doesn’t reveal any more of his plans to the audience than he does to Bobby. We learn who he is by what he does. But he’s not Michael Corleone [or Jackie Brown], for God’s sake. He isn’t unspooling some baroque scheme, he’s getting through each day the same way. He has clear limitations. We can all put ourselves in his shoes.

When he falls in love with Katie, the camera does too. She has a beaming radiance and talks of meditation and health food. By the time he gets tragically distracted, I’m no longer rooting for Bobby to get it together and become worthy to take over Eddie’s job, I’m rooting for Eddie’s happiness. He’s gone from a paternal figure to being the main person we care about.

And then he screws up and gets fired. I think I speak for the audience when I say that this did not anger me. He found a woman, and with respect to his job, the narrative had always implied that his job was doomed. This is not exactly Death of a Salesman in terms of tragic misery.

One of the most memorable scenes is when Eddie’s moving out of his house after being fired. He’s wearing ratty comfortable clothes and packing drinking glasses into a box. We’re finally seeing him off duty. He’s tired and irritable but coming to terms with forced retirement. He’s dealing with this by packing up his life in a thorough and careful way, like he always did before the fatal flaw was activated. His life isn’t over. The most tragic thing is that he’s sadder but not wiser, because he was pretty wise already.

—

Even more spoilery spoiler alert!

And then … Bobby goes looking for where Eddie went after he moved. Clues lead him to Katie. Eddie’s there with her. They’re in Mexico living off the proceeds from the faked robbery. Turns out he knew there would be an attempt on the jewels if they kept frequenting that brothel, so he put fake jewels in the normal compartment and the real jewels in an even secreter compartment, and kept the real jewels throughout his firing ordeal and the insurance investigation, and then vanished. Does he do that every night? Does he show fake jewels to people in the guise of real jewels sometimes? Every customer trusts him, so that seems unlikely. Did he start doing this when he started working with unreliable Bobby? Now that Eddie’s committed a crime for the first time in his life, why does he trust Bobby more? Bobby is very relieved to find out all this, and they laugh and sip drinks in paradise.

So it turns out he didn’t have a tragic flaw after all. Let’s go back to that interview with Daniel M. Cohen.

I’m almost never a fan of the third act device of a crime/robbery, but Diamond Men uses it as a catalyst for Eddie to make a life-altering decision and it worked surprisingly well. Could you discuss your reasons for setting up the scenario in this way?

You answered your own question, exquisitely! Isn’t it the case that plot points become ‘devices’ when they fail to resonate on more than one level? They seem like add-ons. But if they’re integrated, they feel organic. [WARNING: SPOILER!] When Eddie opens up to Bobbie’s suggestions, and becomes vulnerable to Katie’s (Bess Armstrong) allure, he compromises the credo he’s lived by for so many years. Without getting too Jungian, (although I’m a real fan of that sort of thinking) his surrender to the feminine carries with it threats that go deep. It’s often referred to in the vernacular as ‘the cost of doing business.’

Yes! Except that all the while, he knew he was compromising his credo and he compensated perfectly. Suddenly this manifestly unambitious man is Gene Hackman in Heist? Just let him be unlucky. Don’t abruptly change his principles.

I do appreciate the “WARNING: SPOILER!” for a fairly predictable plot point that is totally undone later by a plot twist which remains unspoiled. Maybe Cohen didn’t like the deus ex machina but put it in to make festival audiences smile at him during the Q&A sessions. No matter the motivation, this plot twist is a rare combination of unexpected and unhelpful.

The film’s climactic plot twist, which I won’t divulge, is another possible point of contention. This isn’t because it seems more Hollywood than anything else in the picture; it’s because Cohen deceitfully tampers with his hero’s motivations in the course of setting the whole thing up. He clearly likes Eddie and the other two principal players in this story so much that he wants to reward them, and it’s hard not to share his good feelings about them.

Hot Millions [Eric Till, 1968]

Is it true what Wikipedia says? I hope it is. I hope the only good interior footage of the Beatles’ short-lived Apple boutique — the only footage of it actually in use, the shopgirls and customers — has Bob Newhart in it. That would be fantastic. That’s the store where Newhart’s uptight American computer nerd chooses to treat Maggie Smith’s klutzy cockney spinster during her brief attempt to vamp him, in this oddly touching caper comedy.

Rarely does something call to mind A Fish Called Wanda, a film that the word “triumph” seems to describe, though a triumph of I’m not sure what . This comes close, with a caper plot that is really a very simple plan, a very unrealistic plan, and one that the characters frequently ignore, but not for random jokes, more like random moments of heart. Instead of rapid banter, the funny lines are Peter Ustinov’s W.C. Fields-esque asides and other characters’ bemused responses. Enjoy Newhart’s nerd-resentment, Malden’s Texan bravado, and Smith’s airheadery. To compensate for all these slow talkers, the editing is odd. Longish, witty conversations end with a sour note, like every character is unsatisfied with what just happened. Quick-cut montages, like when Ustinov is traveling around Europe setting up fake companies, or when Maggie Smith is getting fired from jobs, are really, really quick-cut. You’ll see an unhurried 20-second cut to establish that a montage is occurring, and the rest of the cuts are like half a second each, and then you’re back to another long conversation and gradually figure out what the heck that montage was about.

Then, as in A Fish Called Wanda, you have very sweet love scenes. Not sex scenes, but, like, people falling in love. These move slowly. We’re led to believe that Maggie Smith’s character can only do one thing competently, play the flute, and her life is aimless and hesitant because she isn’t the sort of person who gets a job doing that. Some scenes that are intended to be uproarious [like when she’s taken her dress off to change the typewriter ribbon] just don’t have the timing to make them anything other than gentle depictions of likeable people. This is especially true in the scenes with the absent-minded genuine computer expert whom Ustinov cons and impersonates. What a nice guy. When the setting shifts to the tropics it starts to seem like one of those soulless Tony Curtis comedies of the period, and hurries to the final scene [over which the credits roll], which returns us to the satisfying pleasantness that makes up most of the movie.

Elsewhere, Karl Malden’s character is the rare movie titan of industry who is unpretentious and thinks his company is doing good work, and even knows something about what the company does. I don’t know how much we can credit the director for this [Eric Till was making his first feature film, and has had a long career mostly in TV, mostly in Canadian TV even], but Till does make us feel fond of Ustinov’s character. Who is, after all, a non-charming, secretive con artist who has very dubious reasons for exploiting people the way he does.

It’s been lamented that Ustinov’s post-Topkapi roles largely came from how “audiences wanted him to be just a funny, foreign fat man”. All I can say is that if Peter Sellers was in this film instead of Ustinov it would have been hard to stand. This is just the sort of role Sellers used to play, and he would have brought such a superior attitude to all the comic exchanges that you’d be reduced to rooting for Bob Newhart and thinking Maggie Smith is certifiably mentally challenged instead of just inattentive to detail. 35 years later Ustinov was Friedrich III of Saxony in Till’s Luther [starring Joseph Fiennes].

”It happened because my favorite director is Eric Till, with whom I worked in the past, and in fact I got an Oscar nomination as a scriptwriter — in collaboration with somebody I never met, and have not met to this day — for a film called ‘Hot Millions,’ which Eric Till directed,” Sir Peter said, referring to the 1968 film in which he also starred. ”I figure he’s the best director I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked with several famous ones. He, at the age of 70, suddenly thought of me, at the age of 82, and thought I might be a good Friedrich the Wise.

”I didn’t have anything against it, except that I can hardly walk,” he said. ”But we coped with that because I leaned on things and staggered through the film in some measure. We saw eye to eye about everything, including the lack of a scene in the script, which went in eventually, in which Friedrich meets Luther. It makes it very feeble if he just looks through windows and says, ‘That’s the fellow Luther, down there — no, no, the one on the left.’ And then we were attacked by the theological advisers, who said, ‘There’s no record of them ever having met.’ I said, ‘There’s no record of most people ever having met.’ ”

Straight Time [Ulu Grosbard, 1978]

Jenny: "You did great on your intelligence test." Max: "Yeah, well, you know, I could have told you that."

Ulu Grosbard hasn’t directed many films, but when he does, they’re believable, believable, believable. The camera doesn’t pay attention to anything but the actors, always following them, just a step ahead of their trajectory, in the TV-drama way. No clutter, nothing showy. Grosbard is mostly a theater director and seems to take quiet pride in how the props aren’t there to be an impressive tableau, they’re all things that might be useful to the actors. YouTube user uhhuhhim has uploaded a bunch of scenes from 1995’s Georgia, another Grosbard exemplar of directing that serves the acting. Here’s a domestic scene.

The cast of Straight Time is a roster of people who would become iconic in late middle age or older. Sandy Baron seems about 25 years younger than he did in 1984’s Birdy or his most famous role in the nineties. M. Emmet Walsh seems about 15 years younger than he did in 1984’s Blood Simple. Harry Dean Stanton seems the same age as in 1984’s Repo Man, but he has a youthful Eric-Idle-in-1970 haircut. Gary Busey embodies the guy who never follows things through and resents those who do, in a more lazy than crazy role. Jake Busey, age 6, is adorable and we worry about him. As Busey’s wife, Kathy Bates [a very rare youthful film appearance for her] is a woman who’s embraced a tragic role in life, calling to mind Michelle Williams in Wendy and Lucy. The one actor I hadn’t heard of, Theresa Russell, has the thoughtful husky voice, long flat hair, serene self-assurance and free-spirited [but under control] approach to relationships that call to mind Scarlett Johansson in In Good Company. Her character makes weird choices, but seems to know what she’s doing.

Although it’s closely based on a book by noted Los Angeles criminal Eddie Bunker, the movie could really be set in Wichita or Buffalo. Cinematographer Owen Roizman [Three Days of the Condor, The French Connection, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Network] finds no beauty in the L.A. landscape, except maybe the desert vistas that no character wants to venture into. He shows Stanton’s beautiful suburban neighborhood and gleaming swimming pool in that ironic, down-with-superficiality way that makes us know Stanton’s going to whisper “Get me out of here.”

Some people get irritated by Dustin Hoffman, and what could be seen as his attempt to find the perfect pitch for his character and then play that one note throughout the movie. It sometimes seems like he’s being unhelpful to other actors, carrying on with this solo virtuosity. If you’re of the anti-Hoffman persuasion this film will not wow you [His character is Max Dembo. Max mumbles, has mood swings that he keeps to himself until he does something inexplicable, is a hard worker, and has a nice little smile], but to everyone else I can’t help but recommend it. In fact, it goes on the list of best Sidney Lumet films, no matter who directed it.

You know how at the beginning of Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle seems like a born loser starved of love, and you can’t stand the people who won’t give him a helping hand? Straight Time does that better. You know how Dog Day Afternoon has a trio of robbers each with a fatal flaw? Compare the dynamic in Straight Time‘s jewel heist. You know how Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead has a doomed jewel heist? This one is carried out by guys who aren’t morons. You know the famous sequence in Sexy Beast when Ben Kingsley is recruiting Ray Winstone? Hoffman recruits Harry Dean Stanton away from his suburban lethargy to a new desperate endeavor, in an almost comforting way. They’re friends who love and admire but don’t trust each other. Like Sonny Wortzik’s plan, Max’s plan would go off perfectly, with no risk, unless something unlucky happens. How unlucky is he?

—

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution [Herbert Ross, 1976]

My memory of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution the novel is of a fairly flat adventure, what you’d expect from a Sherlock Holmes story informed by the mind-opening movements of the sixties and seventies, and with nuanced villains instead of a Rosicrucian cabal of transnational conspirators. In reality it’s far more of a study of Holmes’s addiction and compulsions. I just skipped those parts of the book as a teenager, I’m afraid, and missed out on Sigmund Freud’s psychological revelations about Holmes’s childhood, an early instance of the “troubled backstory that justifies someone who no longer seems like a sympathetic character to our enlightened eyes” motif found in Batman Begins and Tim Burton’s Willy Wonka.

Now the movie, wow, well, the movie, coming right on the book’s heels, is a whole itinerary of fascinating points of interest, without adding up to a story with any suspense. It has some of the most charming period-styled credits you’ll see. It has a sandy-haired Sherlock Holmes [Nicol Williamson] who looks a great deal like Leslie Howard. It has an unrecognizable Robert Duvall as Watson, sounding like one of Terry Jones’s prim and pompous Monty Python stockbrokers. It has a very recognizable Alan Arkin as Sigmund Freud — that great voice is suited for the Freud accent. Even better, it has Alan Arkin, as Sigmund Freud, playing court tennis, in one of the most lovingly-painstakingly-crafted historical reconstructions outside Peter Weir’s Master and Commander.

It has other actors whose ludicrous Teutonic accents I was sure would turn out to be fake. It has an old-timey train combat climax that doesn’t match The Great Train Robbery or Emperor of the North Pole, but is likewise lovingly done. It reminds us that Holmes had not one but two Victorian superpowers — being able to read someone’s mind based on basic demographic knowledge, and access to a bloodhound. It has Sir Laurence Olivier as the world’s meekest man, Professor Moriarty. It has Sherlock Holmes tormented by reptilian visions out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Even when healthy and unable to isolate himself, Holmes spends most of his time silently analyzing his inner turmoil, with brief bursts of detectiving inspired by his contempt for others. Which is what he did in the stories, but now it’s a process of healing.

—

Big Trouble [John Cassavetes, 1986]

The obvious response to Cassavetes’s bemusing final film Big Trouble [written by Andrew Bergman] seems like the correct one: he made it worth watching. The script gives us a bunch of characters that it would be almost impossible to make believable or relatable, but somehow we care. The film is edited in the style of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and contains a bunch of noisy caricatures, but the actors believe in it. Everything said by Valerie Curtin’s character amounts to “Alan Arkin, I am a harpy who makes your life a living hell. I need a better lifestyle. Your family needs money.” but you perceive the subtle gradations of her motivating impulses, as many as Curtin can display.

Alan Arkin and Peter Falk reprise their rapport from The In-Laws [also written by Andrew Bergman]. Beverly DeAngelo plays an ditzy version of the trophy wife/life-insurance beneficiary in Fletch [also written by Andrew Bergman]. Dialogue in the style of The Great Outdoors or the Dangerfield-Pesci exchanges in Easy Moneyis presented with true respect for the characters who utter it, with exceptions for the madcap Arkin-Falk-DeAngelo relationship. The wacky bright color scheme isn’t typical of the time [compare to Fletch — that’s a flashy comedy with a non-flashy look], it’s more a trick to heighten the emotions. The main characters are transplanted from a different age, like The Long Goodbye without the pathos.

It reminds me of The Hudsucker Proxy in how a big budget given to a usually-frugal director manifests in waves of minor characters, like the Chinese laborers, Arkin’s co-workers at the insurance agency, the security guards and cops and rival burglars during the invigorating final break-in sequence. Big Trouble is definitely, let’s say, the equal of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Less mean-spirited, less hilarious, and less predictable. Probably the best 1986 “Big Trouble” movie not to contain this man.